Malawi Hospital Expands Use of Electronic Records
March 27, 2013
Parents and children in Malawi use health passports as a portable medical record. (Alain HY Cheng)
From VOA Learning English, this is the Health Report in Special English.
Electronic medical records are not only for wealthy, industrialized countries. A test project in Southern Africa suggests that using computers to store medical information may also be a good investment in poor countries.
Electronic medical records have been used for about ten years in Malawi to follow the progress of patients with HIV. Now the program is being expanded at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre. The program is called SPINE – Surveillance Program of Inpatients and Epidemiology. It has three goals. The first is collecting basic information about patients’ medical problems. Dr. Miguel San Joaquin says the second goal is to look for changes in the health of all patients with HIV.
“For example, there are issues like how are antiretrovirals working. Are certain diseases like pneumonia going down because of the introduction of new vaccines, and so on and so forth.”
Dr. San Joaquin says the third goal is to help individual patients directly. Patients receive clearly printed information when they leave the hospital so they understand how to take their medicine and what they should do next. This paper is included in a document called a health passport and replaces handwritten instructions that patients received in the past.
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